http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
IF YOU WANT to understand the origin and nature of the press'
mad crush on John McCain, think of these two words: prom night.

Two kinds of people attend high-school proms -- preening popular types and
geeks who lurk in the corners, wondering why their dates never returned from
that "quick" trip to the rest room. In adult life, hot politicians inhabit
the kingdom of coolness, while journalists sit on the outside, looking on --
wishing that, just once, they could dance beneath the mirrored ball.

This voyeuristic sense of impotence makes the political journalist one of
the easiest targets on earth, and John McCain knows it. He has spent years
courting the 97-pound weaklings and Olive Oyls of the press corps. He has
wooed them and wowed them by sharing savage insights about his colleagues.

He jokes with them, confides. He gives them a sense that they matter, that
they have risen to a level where they can serve as faithful repositories for
his insights and secrets.

Few journalists can resist such determined seduction, but that's just the
start. McCain has more ammo in his amorous arsenal. He is a former prisoner
of war. Most guy reporters haven't gotten this close to the military since
their dads made them throw away their G.I. Joe dolls. Furthermore, most of
those old enough to have served in Vietnam either evaded or dodged the
draft -- and booed lustily when Presidents Johnson and Nixon attempted to
prosecute the war.

McCain gives these folks an opportunity to face their pasts and admit that
their casual views on the war were feckless at best. It turns out that
communism was a rotten deal for the people of Vietnam, despite claims that
the North Vietnamese "really wanted" to live under the thumb of the
Vietcong.

Many Children of the Sixties compounded their intellectual errors by
shacking up and doing drugs until their grades cratered or their money ran
out. For years, Baby Boomers remembered these as halcyon years of love and
idealism. But Bill Clinton has destroyed those delusions. The late '60s and
early '70s were, on further review, the Stupid Years.

McCain brings that epiphany home with a wallop. Sure, he partied and goofed
off. But he also got shot down over Vietnam and broken into pieces by his
captors. He refused to take an early out. He demonstrated measures of
courage none of us has yet been called upon to summon, and he has the scars
and infirmities to prove it.

And so the nerds swoon. Reporters scurry onto the Straight Talk Express
eager to get a chance to sit at the man's feet, listening to him not talk
about Vietnam. They revel in his smiles, bask in his laughter, scribble down
his one-liners and conceal his malaprops. They also pinch themselves: They
originally were assigned to cover what editors expected to be a fringe
candidacy, only to find themselves within striking distance of making
history. A year from now, they might actually be invited to a state dinner!

The result is a lot like Stockholm Syndrome, in which captives fall in love
with their captors. McCain is flinty, defiant, politically incorrect,
unmanageable -- a tornado of a man sweeping through the otherwise tame and
barren world of presidential politics. For reporters in attendance, his
buscapade represents a once-in-a-lifetime Near Macho Experience.

Furthermore, there's the added feature of his being a Republican they can
like. Most journalists regard GOP members as an exotic collection of
sickos -- racists, bigots, country-clubbers, homophobes, Bible Thumpers, you
name it. McCain has played into this bias by accusing those who disagree
with him of "intolerance" and singling out for castigation two of the media
establishment's favorite bogeymen, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.

Since love is blind, few reporters have pointed out that Falwell hasn't
spoken in recent years against anything other than Larry Flynt and that
McCain agrees with Robertson on virtually every issue of consequence --
abortion, taxes, welfare, Internet pornography, defense, foreign policy,
educational vouchers, etc. Nor have they pressed him on outright lies and
deceits.

They harbor the view that President McCain would function as a virtuous
version of Bill Clinton. But McCain isn't a liberal. He's a curmudgeon. And
one day, his swooning chroniclers will have to reckon with the fact that the
guy's gruesome wartime experience didn't turn him into a liberal mole. It
made him what he is: an ex-pilot who shoots first and reflects later; a
generally conservative man whose key skills are his relish for picking
fights and his expertise in surviving
them.